Social Media Image Sizes 2016

Keeping up with the constant changes of the various social media sites and the image size dimensions for each profile can be exhausting. Trust us—it's a never ending battle, and the networks like to keep us on our toes.

So for 2016, we wanted to save you a headache or two (or three) and give you some image size cheat sheets! We hope these will help you as you get started or even refresh your social profiles. Let us know if you have any questions in the comments below!

WordPress Media

For most websites, a good rule of thumb is that your image dimensions should be no wider than the width of your web page.

WordPress has a useful thumbnail feature that offers three different sizes of any image you upload.

When you upload an image, WordPress will automatically create:

a Medium Sized version (300px wide by default)

a Thumbnail (150px wide by default)

or Full Size (the size as uploaded by you)

You can therefore always choose to use your full size image, or the Medium or Thumbnail. These default file sizes can be changed under Dashboard > Settings > Media.

Unfortunately there is no one size to rule all web media, but as a rule of thumb, if you have a square version and a landscape version of an image, one of the two options should meet the requirements of most social media sites. As for the actual dimensions, social media sites are all over the map.

If you’re sharing a rectangular image that’s a 2:1 ratio (meaning it’s either twice as tall as it is wide or vice versa), this will work across most social sites. An example would be sharing a blog post image that is 600 px x 300 px. For Pinterest, however, vertical images work best. [shakes fist at Pinterest]